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There are a lot of reasons to see Christianity as false. As an atheist, I usually have some semblance of a rebuttal for every argument I hear for the religion that everyone believes except me (or at least it feels that way). Of course, some arguments against Christianity are better than others, including “Science has disproved God” (sorry, but that can’t be proven or disproven) or “Jesus was copied from earlier deities like Osiris and Horus” (this is possible, but I’m not convinced by it). I’m generally not phased when an atheist argument like this falls through, because I feel as though there are others that simply cannot be refuted. Many of the solid arguments against the existence of the Abrahamic God involve the inherit contradictions of his character.

I wrote in January about the events that led up to my untimely coming out conversation with my mother. First, my fiance’s and my “immoral” private life was leaked, which led to my family expecting us to stop and being appalled when we refused to apologize. This ended in me coming out to my mother as an atheist as a way to provide some explanation for why we didn’t play by her Lutheran rules. After talking to her and to my oldest sister, the wife of a pastor, my fiance and I safely assumed that her pastor-husband would have moral qualms, if not strict religious restrictions, from marrying together two dirty sinners such as the two of us, as had been our original plan. We informed him that we had decided to go a more secular way—getting married at our reception hall using a non-pastor officiant—to avoid this cognitive dissonance. Continue reading “Coming Out to My Sister and Her Husband”

I once wrote an essay on why a naturalistic worldview does not invariably lead to nihilism. In this essay, I argued that morality is objective with or without a god. I tried (so hard) to use this to make the case that there is a definite black-and-white law of right and wrong (yes, I used C.S. Lewis’ reasoning to make this point) within the human race, because I believed that without it, nihilism would ensue. I had been told once that anyone who is honest with herself and is a true nihilist would, in the end, commit suicide because of life’s overwhelming meaninglessness. It’s understandable that given this factor, I saw the link between naturalism and nihilism to be a deadly one, so I tried my very best to argue for atheistic objective morality.

When I moved into my dorm room to start my senior year of college last August, I went on a shopping spree of atheist books with which to fill my new bookshelf. At that point, I had eight atheist books and seven Christian books, and I had seven more atheist books coming in the mail from Thriftbooks (which I highly recommend: I bought seven books for $26!). Since then, my bookshelf has been slowly expanding through gifts from my fiance and romantic trips to used bookstores together on rainy Sunday afternoons, as well as random orders from Thriftbooks. I’ve only made it through four and a half books so far, but of course I accumulate more much faster than I read.

There’s a trend that I’ve noticed among Christian women, specifically in their blogs (some examples are here, here, and here), to put a great amount of their gender identity into their religion, and for a while I wondered why that was. Why, for so many Christian women, is their gender such a salient part of their religion? Continue reading “Religion vs. Women”

When I wrote my review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I said that Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great was the next book that I’d be reading. Well, I started it, but then when I went home for Christmas, I started reading Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Towards God, as it was more family friendly–at least around my family. Now that I’ve finished it, I will actually read God is Not Great soon, but not until I officially end my time with The Case for a Creator by publishing this review post. Continue reading “The Case for a Creator Review”

Last week, I wrote on a talk that I attended at school about the bible and homosexuality. It turns out that that was the first of many talks that I’d be sitting through. This week was a “focus week” of sorts in which my college would have one or two talks per day, and this year’s theme was loving your neighbor. Of course, they were Christian-themed presentations, but some of the ones I went to were surprisingly good. Although they used the bible as a basis instead of common sense and human empathy, they focused on loving and being respectful to your neighbor, which are universal themes that everyone should practice despite their religion or lack thereof. Continue reading “8 Ways to Build Interfaith Bridges”

In the fall of 2017, I went to a talk at school called Homosexuality and The Christian. It was a small informal thing in the student union, held by a resident director. She talked from personal experience, saying that she had close friends and family members who were gay. She went on about how to deal with “same-sex attraction” as a Christian, reiterating the views of a Christianity-homosexuality scholar named Matt Yarhouse. I believe that he ultimately advocates for celibacy if one is same-sex attracted and it disobeys one’s religion, and he suggests that one can find companionship with friends and in the church, and of course, in Jesus Christ himself. Continue reading “Homosexuality and the Bible”

Usually, when I write about my Christian college experience, it’s about coming out to friends or classmates, or about insane Christian teachers who would probably have gotten fired if the college had actually known what they’re teaching to students. Only once before have I dedicated a post to the atmosphere itself of my private Christian college.

“After all, other than attending chapel, we aren’t required to fast, read the bible, or go to bible study or church. “How bad can it be?’ says the Christian student attending the Christian college.”